Month: February 2012

Two related news items from last week: Tom Martinez died, and Jeremy Lin kept succeeding.
1) Most people haven’t heard of Tom Martinez. The obituaries mention that he coached at a small school in California; he worked with a succession of quarterbacks who became great, most prominently Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. Martinez is …

Pilots have checklists. Doctors and nurses have patient-care checklists. Not because they’re dummies but because they are smart enough to know that they’re in a performance business. They know that a good checklist is not a crutch — it’s a tool.
The real question is, if checklists are good for pilots and doctors, why not teachers …

So here’s a question: does high-quality learning — by which I mean deep, deliberate practice — create a telltale facial expression, sort of like what a poker player would call a “tell”?
And if it does, can we use that tell as a guide?
In the book I talk about the “Clint Eastwood faces” I encountered in …

The other day I got a call out of the blue from a U.S. Senator (who’ll remain anonymous here), with an interesting problem: he wanted to get better at his job. Quick background: he’s in his mid-fifties, and not a career politician; he’s not in danger of being defeated in an election, so he figures …

I love this story (click to watch the above video). It’s about Bob Fisher of Centralia, KS (pop: several), who decided at age 50 to become the best free-throw shooter on the planet. And then he went out and simply did it. It’s worth a look, especially to see the homemade contraptions he uses to …

So there’s a Big Exciting Idea that’s been whizzing around the educational oxygen recently. It’s called “flipping the classroom.” Bill Gates is a fan; so is Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman, an advisor to President Obama.
Here’s how it works: In regular classrooms the teacher stands at the front of the room and explains, the kids …